Design verification is a common process for testing a newly designed integrated circuit, board, or system-level architecture, to confirm that it complies with the requirements defined by the specification of the architecture for that device. Design verification for a device under test (DUT) may be performed on the actual device, but usually a simulation model of the device is tested.
Verification of electronic designs has typically three forms. At an early stage, before the electronic design is implemented in hardware, simulation is conducted on a model of the design. Another form is emulation, in which one electronic hardware is used to mimic the behavior of another (tested) electronic hardware. At more advanced stages of design development, a system on chip is validated, in a process which is typically referred to as post-silicon validation. Post-silicon validation is the last stage in the electronic design development, before the electronic design is manufactured.
Post-silicon validation tests are carried out on actual devices running at speed on realistic system boards, the results of which are assesed by a logic analyzer and other validation tools.
Recently a tool was developed that allows a user to construct an abstract scenario by dragging actions (actually symbols of such actions) from a set of available actions into a designated space in a graphical user interface, defining the relations between the selected actions (the order in which they are to be performed, e.g., sequentially or in parallel), and generating a test code from the constructed scenario.